BAGHDAD — Abu Mahdi al-Mohandas is one of more than 6,000 candidates who are running in next month’s Iraqi parliamentary elections, but he’s probably the only contender who won’t set foot on the campaign trail for fear of a U.S. assassination attempt.
“I was told, officially, by the speaker of parliament and a high-ranking Iraqi official that it’s preferable I don’t show up before the election because they couldn’t assure I would be protected,” al-Mohandas told McClatchy Newspapers in a rare, two-hour phone interview Wednesday from Tehran. “Since 2005, the Americans have conveyed a message through an Iraqi mediator that they’ll kidnap or assassinate me.”
Campaign posters around Baghdad depict al-Mohandas, 56, as a white-bearded elder statesman who belongs to the main Shiite Muslim ticket that is challenging Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s bloc.
Al-Mohandas’ name also appears on a more dubious list: Last summer, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned al-Mohandas, accusing him of helping to train Shiite militia members to attack U.S. forces in Iraq and of moving weapons from Iran into Iraq for that purpose.
Although he’s a member of the Iraqi parliament, al-Mohandas lives in neighboring Iran, effectively exiled from his home country because of Washington’s accusations that he’s an Iranian proxy with a terrorism-related rap sheet that dates to a 1983 attack on Western embassies in Kuwait.
Earlier this month, Gen. Ray Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, described al-Mohandas as the right-hand man to Qassem Soleimani, the powerful head of the Quds Force, the covert arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
A Treasury Department statement said al-Mohandas had employed instructors from Lebanon-based Hezbollah to train Shiite militias, including members of radical cleric Muq tada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, to attack U.S. and coalition troops. It alleged that al-Mohandas ran networks that moved munitions — including mortars, Katyusha rockets and sophisticated roadside bombs known as explosively formed penetrators — from Iran into Sadr City, a Shiite militant stronghold in Baghdad.
“He’s in Iran for a very good reason, which is . . . if he ever set foot in Iraq and we knew it, we would have grabbed him in a heartbeat,” said a former senior U.S. official with knowledge of the case against al-Mohandas, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
“He was directly implicated in attacks on Americans. I found the evidence to be totally compelling,” the official added.
In the telephone interview, al-Mohandas called the U.S. claims against him “absurd” and “ridiculous.”
Still, he takes the allegations so seriously that he is not quite ready to return to Iraq, even though his parliamentary immunity and an American-Iraqi security pact that requires the U.S. to get official Iraqi permission for arrests would offer him some measure of protection.
“I might return” after the election, al-Mohandas said. “I’ve lived through dangers before and have escaped death dozens of times.”
